STIMULATING RESPONSES PT. 3

 More fun with geometrical approximations as in Part 2, but this time, a little shorter.

In that essay, I gave visual examples as to how the concrescence of vertical meaning in a narrative could be represented as an increasing amplitude of the up-and-down variations in a straight line, which represented the forward progress of lateral meaning. Now, the only complication to this illustration is that my previous essays have established is that such concrescence also appears in the elements of lateral meaning, the potentialities I've labeled "the kinetic" and "the dramatic." However, whereas the increasing concrescence of vertical values can be shown as greater amplitude, concrescence of lateral meaning is geometrically expresssed by the relative thickness of the line, as per these three examples:

 

 The thinnest, and thus least dense, of the lines represents the "poor" state of either kinetic or dramatic potentiality. the next thickest represents a "fair" state, and the thickest represents a "good" state.

Just to give three examples applicable only to the dramatic potentiality:

A story with possibly the least dense drama-- for instance, a Roy Rogers Z-western-- would be represented by the thinnest line.

A Lee/Kirby FANTASTIC FOUR would usually be in the middle, representing a fairly dense dramatic potentiality.

And something like Faulkner's A LIGHT IN AUGUST would merit the thickest line of good drama. Of course, the lines would also be more or less jagged depending upon the intensity of the vertical amplitude. The mythopoeic amplitude for particular FANTASTIC FOUR stories might vary according to each story's content, even though the thickness of the lateral representation might stay the same. Thus "The Impossible Man" and "The Galactus Trilogy" might have the same level of emotional drama (even though one is expressed through comedy) but very different levels of mythopoeic amplitude.    

ASPIRIN FOR ANTHOLOGIES PT. 2

In my original 2015 ASPIRIN FOR ANTHOLOGIES, I was concerned with mapping out the phenomenological affiliations of each of the separate stories in the SIN CITY films, which were reviewed here. This sequel-essay, however, is concerned not with phenomenology but with mythicity.

Today I reviewed the 1962 film TALES OF TERROR, the fourth of Roger Corman's cycle of Poe-or-Poe-curious movies. I noted in the earlier essay that anthology films have to receive different critical estimation than other forms of anthology:

...the problems of what I'll call "non-centric serials" are nothing next to that of anthologies in the medium of cinema. In other media-- I'm thinking primarily, though not exclusively, of prose, comics, and television-- every story within a serial anthology stands on its own. However, a film-anthology represents a concatenation of stories that cannot stand apart from one another, unless they are surgically separated. In some anthologies, the stories are not associated in any way, except by dint of appearing in the same collection. Some are tied by virtue of being adaptations of the work of a single author, as is the case with 1963's TWICE TOLD TALES, and some are associated through a common framing-device, as in 1945's DEAD OF NIGHT, where all of the stories may been dreamed by a single interlocutor, leaving it unclear as to whether the stories "really" happened or not within the film's diegetic reality.

I later reflected on the possibility that the second of the two SIN CITY films, subtitled A DAME TO KILL FOR, might actually be best ascribed to the phenomenality of "the uncanny" even though it contains one indisputably marvelous element-- that of Hartigan's nearly impotent ghost. What I called "the thematic underpinnings" of Frank Miller's SIN CITY world align much more with the uncanny than with the marvelous, and thus I considered the possible that the one marvelous element might be deemed of marginal significance.

I have no problem with rating the phenomenality of TALES OF TERROR as dominantly marvelous, since only the second of the three segments, "The Black Cat," is uncanny in nature. But if I were rating each of the segments separately in terms of their complexity of symbolic discourse, "Morella" would be "good," "The Black Cat" merely "fair," and "M. Valdemar" would come in as "poor." Yet I chose to rate the entire anthology-film as "good."  My rationale for this decision-- the 'aspirin" that relieves me of my analytical headaches-- is that I've already rated some extended sequences of related stories as mythically "good" even when they contain portions of the whole that are less-than-good.

A pertinent example appears in my review of the 1983-86 color-comics series COYOTE, as written by Steve Englehart. These sixteen issues necessarily comprise a "centric serial," in that all of the stories are centered upon main hero Coyote, and so the form of this sequence of stories is radically different from the "non-centric" film TALES OF TERROR, which is very loosely tied to other "Poe-cycle" productions in that all are "adaptations of the work of a single author." Yet the same principle seen in COYOTE applies, and in the same manner. Thus Englehart and his collaborators begin COYOTE on an extremely high note of mythicity, but the symbolic discourse crests at one point and the serial ended on a lower note:

Englehart also worked the continuity of the “Djinn” story into Coyote’s mythos reasonably well, but over time the writer created too many wild subplots, so that the series came off as belonging to the “everything plus the kitchen sink” school.

My entire reason for championing complex symbolic discourse has been to throw a light upon this particular aspect of the creative process, which can develop in any form of literature, "high" or "low." I consider that once an author has reached a high amplitude in his symbolic discourse, he's achieved much of the "high spirits" that Nietzsche found so instrumental to creativity-- and thus, even if later segments of the same project may not rise to the same heights, the later segments are somewhat ennobled by their connection to the earlier ones, at least in THE COYOTE SAGA. And for analogous reasons, TALES OF TERROR gets a "good" rating just because "Morella" shows writer Richard Matheson at his best, even if he doesn't sustain it for the later parts of the film.

INDIVIDUAL VS. COLLECTIVE AMPLITUDE PT. 2

In my first essay on this subject, written three years ago, I pointed out the way a given group of characters might accue mythic amplitude even though said mythicity inhered only in the character's membership in the group, my first example being the Injustice Society of the World. Then I cited another example, the portrayal of the X-Men in the graphic novel GOD LOVES, MAN KILLS, and noted that all of the mutant heroes had a collective form of amplitude even though individually they were less than distinctive.

This week's mythcomic, "A Dream of Monsters," follows the latter pattern. Four of the six heroes-- Quantum Queen, Elvar, Dartalon, and Aviax-- have no mythic identities individually, but only collectively, insofar as they are part of Clonus's brood of mutated "children." Re-Animage has a little more individual mythicity, simply because his creators had to devote some cosmological thought to the process by which his body regenerates. The mental mistress Psyche, however, plays a more central role in the tale insofar as she is "the good mother" against Velissa's "bad mother," though even so, "Monsters" seems to be much more about the Frankensteinian story of Clonus-Prime, his wife Velissa, and the Hatchlings. Later stories in the short-lived WANDERERS series made some attempts to give the heroes some myth-status, as when Aviax, a fellow who can turn into various types of birds, fights an evil scheme that involves the extermination of birds, but all of these stories failed to imbue the sketchy characters with any symbolic stature.

In THE INJUSTICE SOCIETY OF THE WORLD, the starring heroes of the Justice Society don't have much mythicity compared to the villain-group. In the earlier tale A CURE FOR THE WORLD, the Society-members have more mythicity, but only in the collective sense. None of the heroes' particular skills or potentialities are emphasized, bur rather, all of them are made into vessels for the story's message regarding the liberating effects of democracy. If the same story had been told with six different DC heroes, it probably would have read about the same.

It is, however, not impossible for a narrative to sustain both individual and collective myth-amplitude, at least better than "Dream of Monsters" does. In THE JUSTICE LEAGUE'S IMPOSSIBLE ADVENTURE, five League-members are transported to an alien world by a group of judgmental beings named "the Impossibles."  The Impossibles remove the powers of Superman, the Flash, Wonder Woman, Aquaman and J'onn J'onzz simply because all five received their abilities without working to earn them. The powerless heroes are then obligated to defend the cosmic judges against a group of predacious aliens. During the battle, most of the heroes find that the removal of their powers turns out to be a Good Thing, because it either removes their weaknesses or prevents them from having their former powers turned against them. (For instance, Aquaman is attacked by mental waves from a brain-creature, but he realizes, somehow, that the waves could've slain him had he still had his telepathic powers.) So collectively, all the members share the amplitude of "earning what was not earned," but since the script exploits each of their individual myth-identities, each hero also has an individual myth-amplitude.

ADDENDA: Since, going by Google, I seem to be alone in appreciating JLA #59, I'll add that although Gardner Fox works into the story the weaknesses of Superman and J'onn J'onzz readily enough, he couldn't really do this with the other three. The Flash has no specific vulnerabilities, Aquaman's weakness of needing immersion in water only takes place after a full hour, and Fox probably didn't even know that the Amazon, as written by her creator, lost her strength (sometimes) if a man chained her-- or welded her bracelets together-- or whatever Marston wanted to write at the time. That's probably just as well, as we spared a scene in which Wonder Woman had to say, "The Crystal Man welded my bracelets together, but since I don't have my Amazon strength, I-- uh-- well, I'm still chained up!" (Oddly, the story does give Wonder Woman a psychological block, which is slightly appropriate, just because her creator was of the psychological profession.)

NARRATIVE AND SIGNIFICANT AMPLITUDE PT. 2

Though this post continues some of the thoughts from Part 1, I was tempted to title it something like "Narrative and Significant Dominance in the Two Modes." But that would've been more work to type.

The essential theme of AMPLITUDE PART 1 was to re-examine once more the principles by which I established my literary reading of the economic idea of "active and passive shares." However, though that essay was done in October 2018, its general principles were stated in June 2017 in the short essay EXCESSIVE COMBINATORY FORCE:

So I have at least made the essential statement that for the combinatory mode as for the dynamicity-mode, "excess of strength is proof of strength," as Nietzsche aptly said.

Now, in AMPLITUDE I cited two completed serial runs, using the Silver Age RAWHIDE KID as an example of a work with an "active share" with respect to the combinatory mode, and the 1960s LOST IN SPACE as an example of a work with a "passive share" with respect to the dynamicity mode. Generally speaking, I've aligned the two modes in line with the "narrative" and "significant" values outlined by Northrop Frye. The combinatory mode aligns with "significant values," since only the reader, the audience who interprets a work's significance, can suss out the dominant phenomenality of a work or group of works. The dynamicity-mode aligns with "narrative values," since such values are tied in with the internal values of the story, in this case being whether or not the characters do or do not wield exceptional levels of power in order to produce the narrative.

For that reason, I stated that even though only about nine percent of all RAWHIDE KID stories had metaphenomenal elements, the ones that did have such elements assumed a "value of significance" in the series," Conversely, though there were 23 percent of the LOST IN SPACE stories that boasted scenes of combative dynamicity, I argued that these scenes had a nugatory "value of significance" according to the series' tendency to assert a more pervasive "value of significance" that did not support the combative mode.

What it essentially comes down to is: does a particular aspect of storytelling play a vital role in the story, or series of stories, or is it less than vital?

If the role of this aspect has a strong amplitude, either with respect to narrative or significant values, then it is dominant. If the role of this aspect has a weak amplitude, with respect to either value, then it is, to revive an earlier term, "subdominant."

Some examples may be forthcoming in future.

CONVERGING ON CONCRESCENCE

If there's one shortcoming in my Nietzschean-Bataillean "excess theory"-- aside from the fact that anyone reading about it would have to know both Nietzsche and Bataille to gauge its validity-- is that all too often I've focused on the end rather than the means, the product rather than the process, From the beginnings of this blog I've tossed out such parallel terms as "symbolic complexity," "peak amplitude," "high mythicity," "super-functionality," and "the combinatory-sublime," all of which address the symbolic qualities of the finished literary work. But assume that a reader agrees with me that some works are simply more "ample" than others, whether in terms of symbolic discourse or one of the other three possible discourses. What process, then, explains  how one work reaches "peak amplitude," while other works don't climb that high?

I have yet to read any of the works of Alfred North Whitehead, not even his best-regarded work, PROCESS AND REALITY. However, knowing that Whitehead's philosophy was in part concerned with the ways in which humans construct value, I looked through the index of PROCESS, and wonder of wonders, the unfamiliar word "concrescence" leaped out at me.

Whitehead does not seem to have been adapted for purposes of literary studies much if at all, and most of his concerns seem entirely metaphysical in nature, as seen from this passage from THE INTERNET ENCYCLOPEDIA OF PHILOSOPHY:

This focus on concrete modes of relatedness is essential because an actual occasion is itself a coming into being of the concrete. The nature of this “concrescence,” using Whitehead’s term, is a matter of the occasion’s creatively internalizing its relatedness to the rest of the world by feeling that world, and in turn uniquely expressing its concreteness through its extensive connectedness with that world. Thus an electron in a field of forces “feels” the electrical charges acting upon it, and translates this “experience” into its own electronic modes of concreteness. Only later do we schematize these relations with the abstract algebraic and geometrical forms of physical science. For the electron, the interaction is irreducibly concrete.

Eventually I may read enough Whitehead to learn whether or not his overall system coheres with those that have inspired me, ranging from Nietzsche and Bataille to Frye and Jung. But /happily
the word "concrescence" has a meaning independent of Whitehead. From the online Merriam-Webster:

1: increase by the addition of particles

2: a growing together : COALESCENCE

The term is used in both biology and medicine to signify organs that have grown together improperly. However, there's nothing improper in the process concrescence would connote in my system.

The Latin root of "conscrecense" connoted the ideas of "coagulation" and "solidification," but if the Encyclopedia is accurate, then Whitehead uses this physical process as a metaphor for the way "an occasion" expresses "its concreteness to the rest of the world." If we put aside the philosopher's specialized term "occasion" and replace it with any sort of phenomenal presence within the world of art and literature, then it would seem to aptly describe the intense interrelatedness of such phenomena to one another, much along the lines of Denny O'Neil's description of Hinduism's "Net of Indra," last referenced here:

We're looking at a net.  It has to be a largish one, though exactly how big is up to you... Now, imagine that at each juncture of your net there is a jewel, cunningly hung so it reflects all the other jewels... It's called the Net of Indra and scholars say it was conceived of by a Buddhist monk named Tu Shun about  2640 years ago. It was originally meant as a metaphor for the interconnectedness of everything that exists...

Conscresence, more than its roughly equivalent term "coagulation," suggests the process by which seemingly unrelated phenomena "concretize" into a greater whole. Thus images, symbols and story-tropes which can only have a very limited meaning by themselves take on greater depth when associated with others that have a reinforcing effect.

Further, the word is probably better for describing the intensification of any given discourse than the Aristotelian term I used in the two LINE BETWEEN FAIR AND GOOD that I employed here and here. Aristotle's "unity of action"-- which, when applied to the actual process of art, might be better termed "unity of effect"-- does not adequately represent the way artists bring together the representations of discourse within the four potentialities (even though for the most part I've devoted myself to the discourse of symbols alone). I will in future re-examine the few essays I've written on "unity of action" to determine whether or not "concrescence" proves a better fit, as it does for the LINE essays.

In addition, I'm considering the even more specialized term "hyperconscresence" to denote those works that "concrese" (not a real word, BTW) much better than any others.

NARRATIVE AND SIGNIFICANT AMPLITUDE

Once more I return to the endlessly fascinating subject of the process of domain-transgression, of moving from the domain of the subcombative to the combative, from the isophenomenal to the metaphenomenal, from the functional to the super-functional, and so on. In FOUNTAIN, FOUNTAIN, BURNING BRIGHT, I used the term "amplitude," or more specifically "peak amplitude," to designate the energy a creator needs to bring to a work to move from one level to another:

Wheelwright is not saying that there is an archetype of "Eagle-ness" that sends its *eidolos* down to the huddled masses that they might worship the Glory of the Eagle. The "characteristic amplitude" is not bestowed upon the "eminent instances" by something outside history, and yet, the eminence of the eagle is not *simply* the humdrum concatenation of all the particular times that various human cultures decided that eagles looked cool, as a materialistic blockhead like Roland Barthes would insist. Wheelwright compares his notion of "archetypal content" and "amplitude" to Goethe's concepts of beauty, though personally I think Kant's concept of the beautiful and the sublime might make a better comparison.

I enlarged upon this idea with respect to functionality in THE AMPLITUDE ATTITUDE PART 3:

"Peak amplitude," then, represents the artist's ability to go beyond the mean values of both modes, and to "storm" into the more rarified domains of the sublime. Of course the artist will always have some need of the mean values, what I've also called "the purely functional." But the term amplitude may serve better to bridge abstract concepts like "functional" and "super-functional," or any other such concepts I continue to explore here.

One "abstract concept" to which I've not yet applied the "amplitude" concept is the knotty problem of assigning serial works to a given domain-- that of the combative mode, or of the metaphenomenal-- when all stories in the series don't share the same characteristics. I first addressed this in 2012's  CHALLENGE OF THE SUPER-IDIOM LIST, putting forth the idea of a "51 percent rule:"

I term my solution to this problem the "51 Per Cent Solution."  In business dealings we're accustomed to hearing that a stockholder with 51% of a company's stocks has the greatest advantage, though not an unqualified dominion.  Thus, if one wished to determine the dominant mythos of the Briefer work, one would count up the total number of stories and determine which mythos-type was statistically dominant.  Only an unqualified 50/50 split between mythoi would make such a determination useless, but the paucity of these exceptions proves the rule: most creators start with a given mythos, make only token shifts to other mythoi, usually proving "loyal" to a particular emotional *dynamis.*

Yet I decided that this was not quite enough. Therefore I articulated the idea of "active shares and passive shares" in an essay of the same name, seeking to explore why it should seem to me that, say, a gunfighter who fought just one metaphenomenal threat was an example of a passive share, while another gunfighter who fought a greater number of metaphenomenal threats-- though not even close to a "51 percent majority"-- comprised an "active share."

Still, even this was an imperfect solution, given that in the real world of high finance, active minority shares are still based on their numerical superiority over passive minority shares. If I were to state that RAWHIDE KID could be metaphenomenal based on 7% of his adventures, then why would I not state that the teleseries LOST IN SPACE was in the combative mode, since 23% of that show's adventures qualified as combative, as I put forth in PASSIVELY AGGRESSIVE:

Since 19 episodes out of the total of 83 were combative, this means that 23% of the show's episodes featured megadynamic forces in contention. In my analysis of Marvel's RAWHIDE KID stories from 1960 to 1973, I found that only about seven percent of that character's stories were metaphenomenal, but I still judged that the *WAY* they were employed gave Rawhide a "minority active interest" in that phenomenality. However, once one is below the 50th percentile, the quantity does not matter with respect to judging either phenomenal or combative elements. I judged that the Rawhide Kid saga showed a repeated intent to associate the hero with metaphenomenal elements, and that these became a vital part of his mythos. John Robinson and the Robot sometimes accomplish superhero-like feats-- Robinson sword-demifighting his way through an army of androids in "Space Destructors," or the Robot defeating a universe-conquering "robotoid" in "The War of the Robots"-- but these seem to be anomalies in the "mythos" of this series.

However, there was a better way to speak of this distinction than the perhaps confusing references to a given serial work's "mythos." Thus I return to the distinction Northrop Frye made in his essay "Archetypes of Literature:"

We may call the rhythm of literature the narrative and the pattern, the simultaneous mental grasp of the verbal structure, the meaning or significance. We hear or listen to a narrative, but when we grasp a writer's total pattern we 'see' what he means.

Since both the original run of THE RAWHIDE KID and the original broadcast of LOST IN SPACE are completed serials, it's possible to look back at them and gain a "mental grasp of the verbal structure, the meaning or significance." Neither serial satisfies the "51 percent rule," which might be best compared to one of Frye's "narrative values." But RAWHIDE KID satisfies the significant value of the metaphenomenal, giving it an "active minority share." By contrast, LOST IN SPACE  does not satisify the significant value of the combative mode, for the reasons stated above, and so it proves a "minority passive share."

This linking of two disparate critical concepts, then, provides a more systematic rationale for the verdict announced at the end of KNIGHTS OF COMBAT AND CENTRICITY PT. 2:

...it's often occurred to me that the Spirit himself might not be a combative hero, were I going purely by the 51 percent rule. Yet over the years I've refined this theory to take in the possibility that a series, such as that of the Spirit, may participate in the combative mode even if the majority of the character's individual adventures are not combat-oriented. In my final post on the LOST IN SPACE series, I mentioned that the series, despite various spectacle-oriented episodes, had a "dominant ethos" that was "directed away from combative resolutions." This is pretty much the same as saying that the dominant "significant value" of a series can overrule any disparate elements in the series. I have not yet applied this principle to stand-alone works like IVANHOE, but I have already implied that the subcombative significant value of TROILUS overrules the effect of any battle-scenes in the play. Thus IVANHOE would seem to be an exception of a combative work that does not have the traditional climactic fight-scene, even though it's still thematically important that the hero be willing to undertake such a conflict. These formulations may also call for a modification of my positions on the narrative-significant schism as it related to the combative mode.

EXCESSIVE COMBINATORY FORCE

Having recently referenced the "excess" theory last put forth in 2013's  THE NARRATIVE RULE OF EXCESS, I began wondering to myself if, having applied this standard to the mode of dynamicity, whether I had sufficiently examined it with respect to the combinatory mode as well.

I did find that I had at least mentioned the topic in THE AMPLITUDE ATTITUDE PART 3, however:

Wheelwright's term "amplitude," which he applies to differing levels of poetic resonance, suggested itself as a substitute-- partly because the word connotes the quality of being ample, and thus coheres with my formulation of THE NARRATIVE RULE OF EXCESS. 

So I have at least made the essential statement that for the combinatory mode as for the dynamicity-mode, "excess of strength is proof of strength," as Nietzsche aptly said.

This formulation might be further glossed with reference to Bataille's Nietzchean notions of "acquisition" and "expenditure," particularly since I haven't  returned to Bataille-land since QUICK CANTER ON A HOBBESIAN HORSE, written about four months previous to NARRATIVE RULE.

Time will tell if I get round to such an expansion.

NEAR MYTHS: ["THE WOLF GAL"], LI'L ABNER (1946)

Since I gave an example of a LI'L ABNER mythcomic this week, I decided to recycle a portion of an earlier FEMMES FORMIDABLES essay as a means of clarifying why Capp's "Wolf Gal" wasn't nearly as mythic as his Shmoos, despite possessing equal potential.

Here's the relevant excerpt from the original essay:

In 1946 Al Capp created a feral female with no such convenient inhibitions: the Wolf Gal, who lived in one of the forested areas neighboring Dogpatch with a pack of wolves.  She and her human-eating pack perpetually prey on any humans who venture too close to their territory, and though Wolf Gal could speak as well as any Dogpatch hillbilly-- which isn't saying much-- she thinks of herself as another wolf and considers all other humans her enemies.
Up to this point Capp had created many predatory females, but their mode of predation concerned attempting to seduce Li'l Abner Yokum before his true love Daisy Mae could link him to her in marriage.  Wolf Gal has some leanings in that direction, but the thing that gets her on Abner's trail was somewhat more involved.  When Wolf Gal turns eighteen, she and her pack manage to corner an old crone in her secluded cabin.  Bargaining for her life, the crone reveals that she knows Wolf Gal's nature: that at birth she was born with a "wolf's heart" despite the otherwise normal natures of her hillfolk parents.  A nearby wolf-pack senses that the child is a kindred spirit, so the pack attacks and devours her parents-- much to the delight of the infant child.  In addition to revealing Wolf Gal's origins to the lupine Amazon, the crone also makes a prediction: that Wolf Gal will only know the meaning of "love" under certain circumstances.  Wolf Gal, stung by curiosity, begins to study human mating rituals, as well as catching her first sight of Abner.  She interprets the prophecy to mean that she must kill Abner to learn what love is.
There follows one of the quickest transformations from "nature" to "culture" ever shown in fiction.  Wolf Gal decides that the only way she can get close to Abner in his Dogpatch milieu is to educate herself in the ways of women-- and not hillbilly women, but "sassiety ladies."  She journeys to some big city, locates a finishing-school, and by threatening the teacher's life forces the woman to give Wolf Gal the appearance of a well-bred woman. 

There are three strong myth-kernels here: (1) the continuing opposition of "nature" and "culture," (2) the association of hillfolk with all manner of deviant practices, including cannibalism, and (3) the association between love and death. Yet, there's something blandly functional about Capp's treatment of Wolf Gal's initial arc. It's as though he couldn't quite deal with the blatantly transgressive aspects of the wolf-child myth, and so he reduced it to just another of his many plotlines involving either the romantic seduction or attempted murder of Li'l Abner. I've found this to be an almost syndromic fault among classic American comic strips, in that they so often focus only upon "lateral meaning" as opposed to either "overthought" or "underthought:"

...  my verdict on the narrative story-strips of the classic era is that though they had greater potential for complication-- which I've elsewhere called "amplitude"-- because they could run at great lengths, they often did not use it  because they were so concerned with "straightforward linear narrative." -- STRONG CONTINUITY, WEAK CONTINUITY, PT. 2.

Thus, following the line of thought I've established in the LINE BETWEEN FAIR AND GOOD essays, the "Wolf Gal" sequence is only "fair" because it too is akin to "a disorganized essay with a strong theme statement."

MYTHIC MANGA

Though contemporary Japanese manga (and its various Asian cousins) can be episodic, they're best known today for their sprawling, multi-chapter story-arcs. I don't have an in-depth knowledge of the development of comics in Japan, though I'm aware that the medium's best-known early exemplar, Osamu Tezuka, varied his approach between generally episodic works (ASTRO BOY) and longer, more involved storylines (PRINCESS KNIGHT). Many manga-serials of the past twenty years have gone even further than Tezuka. Eiichiro Oda's ONE PIECE, initiated in 1997, depicts a fantasy-world replete with enough characters and character-arcs to rival (in quantity at least) the novels of Dickens.

Very few American comic books sought to go beyond purely episodic stories until the mid-1960s, when Marvel began making its storytelling mark. Some of the "long arcs" at Marvel resemble simple film-serial cliffhangers, but others may have been more influenced by the narrative example of American comic strips. This online essay asserts that post-WWII Japan was definitely affected by the importation of newspaper strips, though of course there may a host of other factors that influenced the country's fascination with long, involved story-arcs. It's possible that, while the American comic book remained strongly wedded to the short story, Japan made greater strides in the realization of the "novel in graphic form," simply because they had no preconceptions against the idea.

Now, in earlier essays like this one, I've asserted that narratives have 'had their greatest capacity for mythicity when they possessed the traditional "beginning, middle and end," which worked to maximize a given story's potential for "connotative associations."' However, the majority of "long melodrama" comic strips of the classic period lack the scope of the novel in terms of such associations, because "each of these story-lines is just one narrative arc, without a lot of complementary development," 

I certainly wouldn't say that all of the long multi-chapter arcs in manga are necessarily better developed than those of the best classic American comic strips, but the potential has generally been better realized, perhaps because some Japanese authors have emulated the intricacies of the prose novel. At present ONE PIECE has not yet concluded, so it can't be judged in its entirety, but Oda has often laid down involved plot-threads in one sequence that would not culminate until a much later sequence. Whether or not Oda's execution of those plot-lines proves felicitous or not is a separate matter; he's using novel-like narrative devices that were only very rarely utilized in "long melodrama" comics, with an occasional exception like this DICK TRACY sequence.

This week's mythcomic will be DANCERS IN THE VAMPIRE BUND, which boasts a heady complexity of plot and character. However, the original 14-book sequence of BUND, completed in 2012, was something of a novel-fragment. Two years later, the author came forth with SCARLET ORDER, a four-volume follow-up, which might be loosely regarded as the "end of the novel" (although some plot-threads were not resolved, and were certainly intended as lead-ins to further tales). Despite its heavy fantasy-content, BUND is written largely like a political thriller, and this raised the danger that the author might have created too many characters and story-arcs to allow for a reasonably clear "beginning, middle, and end." However, I'm pleased to see that there is a sense of resolution in SCARLET ORDER, so that I can finally put the series on my list, after having alluded to its potential excellence back in this 2011 quasi-review.

INDIVIDUAL VS. COLLECTIVE AMPLITUDE

In MORE AMPLITUDE ATTITUDE I wrote the following of Robert Kanigher's original take on the Injustice Society of America.

Kanigher favors almost schematic arrangements of his plots and the characters caught up in them, and thus I think most though not all of his stories follow the process of "the overthought" rather than that of "the underthought." As a result, even the individual villains in the Injustice Society story leave something to be desired in the mythicity department; they only take on mythic status through their association. This also stands in contradistinction to Fox's creativity in giving each of his "Sinister Sorcerers" a distinct mythic persona.

It occured to me to rethink this a bit. If a creator has no intention of giving a "mythic persona" to each individual characters within a collective entity, does that in itself compromise the amplitude of the mythic content? Obviously there are various movie-monsters who retain a collective mythic persona despite their lack of individuality, such as the Aliens and the Predators. Every time an Alien or a Predator appears, each monster is virtually indistinguishable from all the others, except for a few defined by their biological functions (the Alien Queen Mother in ALIENS, obviously).

Of course, the comic-book villains of the Injustice Society originally appeared as solo players, even if their potential as mythic figures in their solo stories was more potential than actual. It's entirely possible that the Golden Age villains accrued more mythicity in the Kanigher tale than any of them ever had in their individual appearances.

Now, last week's mythcomic, GOD LOVES MAN KILLS, offers an interesting contrast with regard to the heroes.

The heroes of the 1960s X-Men feature, like the aforementioned Golden Age villains, displayed more mythic potential than mythic actuality. Cyclops, Beast, Iceman, Angel and Marvel Girl had some interesting symbolic moments, but neither their individual heroic personalities nor their collective identity as "the representative of good mutantkind" ever quite caught fire. In the stories analyzed in these two recent essays, here and here, the main players were given far less attention than their foes (the Sentinels and the Juggernaut) and their mentor Professor X.

Though Chris Claremont did not originate the "New X-Men" feature of 1975. during his long tenure he gave much more attention to the individual personas of the group-- both in terms of the dramatic and mythopoeic potentialities-- and to the group's identity as "outsiders by virtue of their freakish births." That said, in GOD LOVES MAN KILLS, the main players once again are not very distinctive from one another in the symbolic department. Part of this may be because the graphic novel was conceived a stand-alone work, one that was not given canonical continuity-status for several years. However, the main reason is surely that since the X-heroes must present a united front against the pernicious menace of the main villain, they sacrifice their individual mythic identities in favor of a collective one.

There are some differences. of course. Cyclops, being the leader, is also the fount of the ideals of the mutant fight for self-determination, but in line with an "accomdational" posture.

Wolverine, in contrast, is more about the practicality of the situation, while Kitty Pryde is the standard Angry Adolescent.

But aside from Professor X-- whose role is entirely passive, becoming a Sacrificial Victim whose torments are meant to condemn the unholy rather than redeeming the fallible-- Magneto, the defender of a vision of separatist mutantkind, assumes more mythic resonance than any of the regular heroes, despite allying himself with their anti-Stryker program.

In fact, it's arguable that Magneto has more mythicity than Stryker. I pointed out that the religious symbolism of Stryker's crusade was not nearly as well evoked as it might have been. Similarly, Claremont also muffs a potential relationship between Stryker's military background and his implicit endorsement of a "muscular Christianity." In contrast, Magneto's mythicity carries an undiluted power. By this time he had been remodeled as a Holocaust survivor, so the sometime-villain's goal of forming his own bailiwick for a persecuted minority has far deeper sociocultural meaning. Even the collective accomodation-myth embodied by the X-Men has far less effectiveness in this story than the separatism-myth embodied by Magneto, even though his role is more or less that of a "guest star."

Nevertheless, the collective form of mythic amplitude has his strengths, though it may channel more emotive force when it's represented by characters who are, like the Aliens and the Predators, very close to being identical.

LOST IN SPACEFIGHTS PT. 2

Following up with the rest of LOST IN SPACE's Season 1 episodes, which I began analyzing for the combative mode here.

"One of Our Dogs is Missing"-- the Robinsons find an Earth-dog on their planet, also a castaway from a space-voyage. The dog helps them drive away a powerful native monster, but the violence is only functional and is therefore subcombative. (SC)

"Attack of the Monster Plants"-- Dr. Smith causes some of the local flora to mutate wildly, so that the "monster plants" attack the ship. The crew destroys the plants with a chemical attack. (SC)

"Return from Outer Space"-- Will accidentally time-travels back to early 20th-century Earth, and eventually returns to the usual planet. (SC)

"The Keeper, Parts 1-2"-- An alien collector of rare animals shows up and shows interest in collecting Earth-people. In the first part, his weapon fends off laser-fire, but is temporarily incapacitated when its mechanism is broken by a stone from Will's slingshot.  In the second part, the Keeper tries to blackmail the Robinsons into giving up two of their kids, but he changes his mind when exposed to their familial goodness. (SC)

"The Sky Pirate"-- a piratical alien, Captain Tucker, shows up. He poses no violent threat, but an alien blob-monster pursues him for his treasure. When the blob has what it wants, it departs without violence. (SC)

"Ghost in Space"-- an invisible alien, acting like a poltergeist, wreaks havoc upon the Robinsons. At the end he is either slain or driven off by the dawning of the sun. (SC)

"War of the Robots"-- a "robotoid," a robot capable of free choice, menaces the family and is overcome by the Robot in a climactic battle. (C)

"The Magic Mirror"-- Penny must escape from a strange world inside a mirror. (SC)

"The Challenge"-- Will engages in a series of contests with alien boy Quano. overseen by John Robinson and Quano's father, "The Leader." The Leader usurps the tests to challenge the professor, resulting in a duel with "volta swords," which John wins. The story ends with the alien father and son squaring off against a cave-monster. (NOTE: this was the first time actor Guy Williams got to do more sword-dueling a la his earlier character Zorro.) (C)

"The Space Trader"-- an alien trader tries to add Smith to his collection. The Robot cancels his contract and drives him and his pet monsters away with some sort of sonic attack. (C)

"His Majesty Smith"-- an alien race selects Smith to be their sacrificial king; they are defeated by deception rather than force of arms. (SC)

"The Space Croppers"-- a trio of aliens who look like refugees from "Tobacco Road" show up on the planet. They plant a deadly crop which the Robinsons must destroy with gas-bombs. (SC)

"All That Glitters"-- Smith acquires the Midas touch from an alien artifact. Faced with a space-cop who wants to repossess the artifact, Smith chases them away by threatening to "metallize" them. (SC)

"The Lost Civilization"-- When Will plays "Sleeping Beauty" with an alien child-princess, he also awakens her army, all devoted to galactic conquest. John Robinson and the Robot manage to stop the invasion force by clobbering their commander and his flunkies. (C)

"A Change of Space"-- Will and Smith undergo weird changes after entering a space-warp capsule. The capsule's owner threatens the family when he learns they've messed with his property, but no real violence ensues. (SC)

"Follow the Leader"-- an alien warlord's spirit possesses the body of John Robinson. Though the possessed  Robinson has one short fight with Major West, the spirit is only exorcised when Will declares his love for John and causes John to expel the evil from his body. (SC)

______

I'll note that if the series had ended with this season, I probably would not deem it to be in the combative mode, any more than other Irwin Allen serials like "Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea" and "Land of the Giants."

MORE AMPLITUDE ATTITUDE

In January and February 2016 I wrote three AMPLITUDE ATTITUDE essays, starting here, on the subject of using this term to gauge the different elaborations of the combinatory mode. In the first essay, I mentioned that even though the Justice Leaguers were the stars of the Gardner Fox story "Secret of the Sinister Sorcerers," they were also merely functional presences within the story, and that the greatest "amplitude of associations" (a.k.a., "super-functionality") belonged to the three villains of the story.

Now, at the same time, I must specify that this amplitude remains on the level of what I've called "the underthought," since this level of authorial concentrations deals with what Frye called "the progression of images and metaphors," presumably without any prior intellectual arrangement. The "overthought," in contrast, is what I (though not Frye) have called the author's "predetermined complexes of ideas."

With this determination of symbolic discourse in the JUSTICE LEAGUE story in mind, I started re-considering the role of the villains in a much earlier story, "Injustice Society of the World."  This tale of the Justice League's predecessors, the Justice Society, was scripted by Robert Kanigher, though Kanigher substantially built upon the Justice Society mythos largely created by Gardner Fox.

In my analysis, I wrote:

Much of the time, the JSA heroes won their battles a little too easily, partly because so many of their foes were just ordinary thugs and swindlers. I've argued elsewhere that one has to respect the gumption of commonplace crooks in challenging do-gooders who had godlike powers, but it still didn't usually give rise to many memorable battles.
Kanigher, though, seems to understand the potential appeal of a group that expouses an ethic of evil opposed to that of the heroes' belief in good.

In essence, the Kanigher story follows the same opposition in terms of the mere functionality of the heroes and the super-functionality of the villains. And yet, Kanigher's approach lacks the sheer combinatory delight that Fox appears to take in all the beings of "Magic-Land." The "complex of ideas" in "Injustice Society" may not be all that "complex" compared to the more high-minded artcomics. Still, the basic concept seems to proceed from a straightforward idea; that of turning the goody-goody ethics of the established Justice Society adventures on its head, by devices like showing robots impersonating representatives of law and order, or having the Justice Society undergo a faux trial for their "crimes against crime."

And yet, like a lot of Kanigher's work, the writer doesn't seem to elaborate his characters in a symbolic sense. Kanigher produced dozens, perhaps hundreds, of stories for DC Comics over a period of roughly thirty years. The 1966 tale "Beware of Poison Ivy" proves one exception to this tendency, but usually Kanigher doesn't lavish as much sheer symbol-happy imagination upon his characters as does Gardner Fox. Kanigher favors almost schematic arrangements of his plots and the characters caught up in them, and thus I think most though not all of his stories follow the process of "the overthought" rather than that of "the underthought." As a result, even the individual villains in the Injustice Society story leave something to be desired in the mythicity department; they only take on mythic status through their association. This also stands in contradistinction to Fox's creativity in giving each of his "Sinister Sorcerers" a distinct mythic persona.

On a side-note: I would say that O'Donoghue's PHOEBE ZEIT-GEIST also elaborates its symbolic discourse through an overthought-process: everything in it is predetermined by O'Donoghue's scathing opinions on "damsel in distress" fiction. There's a rough parallel, too, in the menaces that dog Phoebe's track: they only have mythic status in the sense that they're a concatenation of stock horrors familiar through pop-fictional usage. Phoebe herself is something of an incarnation of what Nietzsche called "negative will," in that she exists just to be tormented, and thus I would tend to see her also as possessing less amplitude than her tormentors, even though she too is "the star of the show."

LOST IN SPACEFIGHTS PT. 1

I'm returning once more to a topic raised in the second part of THE AMPLITUDE ATTITUDE: on what occasions is it possible for a given series to achieve the combative mode, less because of an emphasis on the continual encounter of megadynamic forces than because of an emphasis upon the outward *form* of such an encounter? In the aforesaid piece I noted that the majority of the Golden Age Spectre's adventures pitted him against mundane crooks, as opposed to devils or demigods-- yet the crooks did have the effect of being "the evil that forces the undead avenger to keep up his crusade." By way of exploring this "outward form" possibility further, I'm going to devote a series of posts to a television series whose status with regard to the combative mode has always been dubious to me.

In my various reviews of STAR TREK episodes, I've made no bones about labeling the entire series as "combative," even those episodes that don't climax in combat-scenes. Few persons familiar with pop culture would doubt that the series stressed the image of Captain Kirk, and occasionally other crewmen, heroically battling super-psychics and lizard-people and so on, all firmly in the "superhero idiom."

The 1965-68 series LOST IN SPACE seems more ambivalent. In contrast to TREK, which was clearly a series with military overtones, SPACE followed the travails of a group of castaways as they bounced around various planets, sometimes resolving their conflicts through spectacular violence, sometimes not. I've decided to examine all the episodes purely in terms of how often they used spectacular violence. If an episode used such violence in a manner typical of the "superhero idiom," it will fall into the combative mode; if not, it will fall into the subcombative mode. Since I'll only talk about the climaxes, it may be possible to get through all three seasons with dispatch. "C" meets combative; "SC" subcombative.

---------------

"The Reluctant Stowaway"-- The sabotage of the Jupiter 2 culminates in the Robot going berserk and seeking to destroy the ship: there's some violence as the Robot fends off the male space-jockeys but it is defeated when Major West pulls off its power pack. (SC)

"The Derelict"-- the ship is trapped inside a derelict and must blast its way out. (SC)

"Island in the Sky"-- Jupiter-2 makes planetfall, and their land-chariot is attacked by an electrical tumbleweed. (SC)

"There Were Giants in the Earth"-- the spacefarers must fend off a gigantic Cyclops with their ray-weapons. (C)

"The Hungry Sea"-- the spacefarers seek to escape devastating waves of heat and cold on the planet (SC).

"Welcome Stranger"-- the spacefarers meet their first oddball human: Hapgood, an astronaut who preceded the Jupiter into space. Hapgood and West have a brawl but it does not occur at the climax nor influence the main plot (SC).

"My Friend, Mister Nobody"-- Penny befriends an invisible cosmic force. When she's hurt, the force goes berserk and attacks the other spacefarers. The Robot discharges energy at the creature but the group is only spared when the creature backs off. (SC)

""Invaders from the 5th Dimension"-- aliens try to take Will Robinson away, to use his brain as their new computer: they're defeated not by force of arms but because Will's humanity undermines their devices (SC).

"The Oasis"-- Doctor Smith temporarily changes into a giant (SC).

"The Sky is Falling"-- an alien family lands on the planet; mutual suspicions lead to a ray-gun fight but the quarrel is obviated by peacemaking overtures (SC).

"Wish Upon a Star"-- Smith acquires a wish-fulfilling machine; an alien comes to reclaim the machine and does so with no violence (SC).

"The Raft"-- Smith and Will are held prisoner by a plant-humanoid, who is summarily killed when John Robinson shoots the creature with his raygun. (SC)

I note that "the Raft" comes close to the combative in presenting a menace that is vanquished by violence. However, said violence is over and done with so quickly that I tend to label it "functional violence." In contrast, the incidents in "There Were Giants" shows a dramatic buildup, in which the spacefarers face considerable menace from the giant before they defeat it with their lasers. This "buildup" is essentially what I'm looking for in terms of exploring the "outward form" of the combative mode.

STRONG CONTINUITY, WEAK CONTINUITY PT. 2

In GRAPHICALLY ROMANTIC I said:

I want to be very careful in evaluating what if any ways that the "long melodrama" strips of the classic comic-strip era-- PRINCE VALIANT, TARZAN, FLASH GORDON, WASH TUBBS-- have to being any sort of "graphic novels." While the individual story-lines of these strips do have greater potential for complication in the sense of being mythic, they don't have much of the "scope" often applied to the general idea of the novel. Since each of these storylines is just one narrative arc, without a lot of complementary development, such arcs might be better compared to the novella than the novel proper.

I also had some critical words for the narrative tendencies of the "long melodrama" strips in STRIP NO-SHOW:

What the elitists missed, however, was that comic strips, even at their greatest levels of excellence, were always hampered by the factors of serial progression. Certainly Sunday pages like NEMO and PRINCE VALIANT could get away with a somewhat "painterly" approach to comics-narrative, but they were the exceptions. Most story-strips, whether they appeared only on weekdays, on Sundays, or in a combined form, chose to pursue a straightforward linear narrative-- again, one designed to seduce the readers into regularly partaking of the newspaper that carried the comic.

Combining these observations, my verdict on the narrative story-strips of the classic era is that though they had greater potential for complication-- which I've elsewhere called "amplitude"-- because they could run at great lengths, they often did not use it  because they were so concerned with "straightforward linear narrative." Thus the long narratives of comic strips often lacked the conceptual "scope" present in long novels-- a scope that I tend to identify with (1) Jung's functions of thinking and poetic intuition, and (2) my modification of Gerard Manley Hopkins' concept of "overthought" and "underthought." The "straightforward linear narrative" characteristic of story-oriented comic strips approximates to what I called "lateral meaning" in the above essay.

Story-strips tend to generate stronger tendency toward continuity than their opposite number, the gag strips. That said, when I was seeking a long story in Chester Gould's DICK TRACY strip, I said that I "found it hard to isolate particular sequences that I consider[ed] symbolically complex." Gould tended to spin off his narratives in an eccentric manner, and critics have attested that he usually did not plan his stories out in detail. Gould seemed to favor the dictum of Dashiell Hammett: "when in doubt, have a man with a gun walk into the room." The sequence I labeled JUNIOR TRACY FINDS A DAD provides a marked exception to this tendency, for throughout the story Gould's narrative is informed by one psychological pattern: to join together a man and a boy who are father and son in spirit. Moreover, to do so, Gould reached back into his previous story-lines, melding together the separate careers of Stooge Viller and Steve the Tramp as major players in his melodrama.

I found a similar "eccentric manner" as I read through several sequences of Al Capp's LI'L ABNER, and thus for the same reason ABNER's long stories are marked by a plethora of melodramatic plot-incidents. These incidents serve to give the reader the sense of linear progress, but they're usually so haphazard that they don't generate any significant mythicity.

My re-reading of ABNER is by no means complete. However, in the upcoming "mythcomic of the week," the sequence I have chosen is not the sort of thing most comics-mavens would have chosen. Most would probably have selected one of Capp's overt satires, like those involving the Schmoos.
The Schmoo storyline is a pretty good example of a strong "overthought," but I don't think it displays the mythic "underthought" that I've been searching for.

ENVIRONMENTAL CONCERNS PT. 2

This is not so much a follow-up to the first ENVIRONMENTAL CONCERNS essay as to my recent myth-analysis of LOVE IN HELL-- reason being that this is the first mythcomic I've examined in which one might argue that the locale is just as important to the story as the two principal characters.

Environment varies in its amplitude throughout the mythcomics, just as that of any presence, even a focal character. In one of my earliest essays on focal presences, I mentioned that in Arthur Conan Doyle's original novel THE LOST WORLD, Doyle's heroes were the focal presences, but that the Lost World itself became the focus in the 1925 film.

There's great precedence for this sort of "man vs. nature" opposition, but this formula has never been nearly as popular as "man vs. man." It's not uncommon, even in the most strongly mythic narratives, for the environment to fade into the background, even if that environment is sometimes a major generator of mythic content. Thus, even though many THOR stories describe the power of the Lee-Kirby Asgard to generate all manner of Nordic strangeness, in "The Mangog Saga" Asgard might as well be the Pyrenees for all the impact that the locale has upon the struggle between main character Thor, his various allies, and the seemingly invulnerable Mangog.

In some situations, the environment retains its mythic nature within a given narrative, but its myth-power stems from a particular character. In the SON OF SATAN story "Dance with the Devil, My Red-Eyed Son," the soul of Daimon Hellstrom is apparently drawn down into Hell, with whose denizens he must battle. Only by story's end does the reader learn that this particular version of Hell is not one that exists independently of its satanic master, for it's actually Satan's own dream.

In a less direct manner, some environments can be seen as being more metaphorical expressions of a character's good or evil: thus in Kirby's NEW GODS saga, New Genesis embodies the creative empathy of its patriarch Highfather and Apokolips is the expression of the corruption of its master Darkseid-- though admittedly both worlds already show those predilections, long before either of the respective "New Gods" comes into existence.

 There's also a sort of ambiguous middle ground. as seen with"the Palace of Ice," In this extended dream, Nemo experiences what I termed "a child's version of the metaphysics of ice and snow, taking in from juvenile pleasures like toboggan-riding and snowball-fights as well as the more profound wonders of the Northern Lights and the mysterious North Pole." McCay probably does not mean to assert that either Jack Frost or his realm possess any reality independent of Little Nemo's imagination. Nevertheless, this ice-world possesses far more amplitude than most real dreams.

In contrast, the Hell of LOVE IN HELL does not seem to be an expression of any character's imagination or personality. Hell does have its ruler, Japan's traditional hell-lord King Enma (who according to some references is actually female), but Enma only makes one appearance in the narrative, and then only toward the very end, where the ruler's gigantic foot intrudes upon the inferno to mete out justice. Rintaro, the "new fish-soul" in Hell, is not especially mythic in himself, any more than any other "everyman" character, given that most such characters are meant to heighten the significance of other characters by their ordinariness. The demoness Koyori serves to explain the ways of Hell to Rintaro, but she's new to the job of being a soul-torturing demon, so she's not a pure representative of Hell, in the same way Darkseid is a pure representative of the ethos of Apokolips.

All this said, though much of LOVE IN HELL's narrative is devoted to describing the infernal domain, I would not go so far as to say that Hell is the"main character" of the story, in the manner that I've said that Wonderland is the "main character" of Carroll's Alice books. In this essay I said that the Alice books were *exothelic,* meaning that 'the narrative is focused upon the will of "the other," something outside the interests of the viewpoint character, though not necessarily opposed to them.' LOVE IN HELL comes very close to this, but in the final analysis it's still more focused upon the evolving relationship of Rintaro and Koyori as they interact both with each other and the strange requirements of their domain-- so that LOVE IN HELL is as *endothelic,* wherein "the narrative is focused upon the will of the viewpoint character or of someone or something that shares that character's interests."


Note: since writing the above I've changed my mind: Rintaro and his sins comprise the series' focal presence, with Koyori qualifying only as a support character.

THE AMPLITUDE ATTITUDE PT. 3

In the end, no matter what specific arguments I put forth, they boil down to the subjective feeling that BEAST [FROM 20,000 FATHOMS] only tromps its way over the megadynamicity threshold, while [THE GIANT] BEHEMOTH "storms" across, in part because it shows a greater propensity toward the "dynamic-sublime."-- STORMING THE THRESHOLD PART. 2.

I don't know how important yet another new term will prove to the ongoing evolution of my lit-crit theory, but I've been thinking about giving a name to this "greater propensity" since late last year. I reread THUS SPAKE ZARATHUSTRA around that time, and so found myself meditating further on Nietzsche's complex theory of "self-overcoming," particularly in COMBAT PLAY PT. 4.

In this essay I wrote: "Only those who consciously admitted the allure of mastery, of wielding power over others, had any true capacity for self-overcoming." Since the German term for this process proves unwieldy, I considered coining a term along the lines of "the overcoming factor" that could applied not to human societies-- which is Nietzsche's focus-- but to literary creations as imagined representations of power relations. But "overcoming factor" would be something that might require re-explanation over time.

Wheelwright's term "amplitude," which he applies to differing levels of poetic resonance, suggested itself as a substitute-- partly because the word connotes the quality of being ample, and thus coheres with my formulation of THE NARRATIVE RULE OF EXCESS. But in addition, "amplitude" has a more physical connotation, one akin to the geometrical representations I used here. This Wiki essay cites the use of the term in classical physics, and the amplitude-type that most coheres with my metaphor would seem to be that of "peak amplitude:"

If the reference is zero, [peak amplitude] is the maximum absolute value of the signal; if the reference is a mean value, the peak amplitude is the maximum absolute value of the difference from that reference.

Even a hypothetical "zero" would not really apply to either of my two modes: the combinatory mode or the dynamicity mode. With regard to the first, in past essays I've subscribed to Wheelwright's view that even the simplest form of symbolic discourse, the "monosignative," always has a potential to assume greater levels of symbolic complexity. With regard to the second, I've also noted that even characters that register as "microdynamic" may have some minor abilities in the realm of self-defense, as shown by the example of Vicky Vale in this essay. Therefore, the base level of both "monosignativity" and "microdynamicity" should be seen as a "mean value" of what is possible within a fictional universe.

"Peak amplitude," then, represents the artist's ability to go beyond the mean values of both modes, and to "storm" into the more rarified domains of the sublime. Of course the artist will always have some need of the mean values, what I've also called "the purely functional." But the term amplitude may serve better to bridge abstract concepts like "functional" and "super-functional," or any other such concepts I continue to explore here.

THE AMPLITUDE ATTITUDE PT. 2

In Part 1 I pointed out that even in stories of high mythicity, not all characters are given super-functional treatment, and that indeed even the characters who are the stars of the show-- characters who may have garnered many archetypal associations in past stories-- may be given purely functional treatment. My opening example was JUSTICE LEAGUE #2, in which the starring heroes take a symbolic back seat to the villains.


On Dictionary.com, "amplitude's" primary defintion is as follows:

the state or quality of being ample, especially as to breadth or width;

largeness; greatness of extent.

Philip Wheelwright invokes the term as a metaphor for explaining why "certain particulars have a more archetypal quality than others." I've correlated this insight with my distinction between "functional" and "super-functional" modes, which appears early in this blog's history, before my acquaintance with Wheelwright, to the best of my recollection.

It occurs to me that in one previous essay, though I was not employing the term "amplitude" at all, I referred to something very similar, when I wrote that "the aspect of the combinatory-sublime may affect the way in which a given protagonist's *dynamis* is received." To illustrate this, I compared two stories in which a murder gave rise to an avenging spirit.

One was the origin story of the Spectre. As Jim Corrigan, he's murdered by mobster Gat Benson. Corrigan's spirit becomes the Spectre, who avenges his murder and then goes on to haunt other criminals as well.

The other was a stand-alone film, TOPPER RETURNS. An innocent woman, Gail Richards, is murdered by a masked man. Gail comes back as a ghost who wants to know who killed her, and so she enlists the aid of befuddled Cosmo Topper to do so. Gail's ghostly powers are much more modest than those of the Spectre, but she can turn invisible and hit people as if she were solid-- which she does in a scene where she fends off the masked murderer before he can kill again. In the end the killer is exposed as a schemer named Carrington, who didn't even mean to murder Gail, but rather her heiress friend.

In both films, the mundane murderer really has no chance to fight back against the ghostly avenger. This alone might mark both stories as subcombative going by the "Hamlet example" I cited here,though in contrast to Shakespeare's play it's the antagonist, not the protagonist, who isn't "sufficient to stand" against a superior force. If the SPECTRE story had appeared as a one-shot horror tale, I would have no problem in deeming it as just as subcombative as TOPPER RETURNS. But patently the murder of Corrigan is a setup for the Ghostly Guardian's continuing adventures, and Gail Richards' murder served no such purpose. Further, though the Spectre's mundane opponents in general aren't able to give the hero much of a fight, they still have something of a super-functional quality in that "criminals in THE SPECTRE represent more than just ordinary crooks: collectively they are the evil that forces the undead avenger to keep up his crusade, rather than going to his eternal rest."

I might have added that Gat Benson and his thugs also demonstrated greater dynamicity than Cartington, who did nothing more formidable than strangle an unskilled woman. By the principles I established here, Gat Benson and all similar mundane Spectre-opponents might be deemed as occupying the "lower level of megadynamicity," simply for having enough moxie to prove an impediment to a godlike opponent. This moxie gives all of the mundane gangsters in THE SPECTRE "the quality of being ample," for which Wheelwright's term "amplitude" may prove efficacious.

In the same essay I also wondered if the killer in TOPPER RETURNS might have registered as a more formidable opponent had he shown some "more prepossessing aspect." I neglected to mention that he does at least don a concealing hat, mask, and dark clothes to commit his murder, but I don't attribute any "quality of being ample" to these. The outfit Carrington wears is merely functional, in contrast to that of some of the other dark-clad uncanny types I've recently reviewed on my film-blog, such as 1932's THE NIGHT RIDER and 1933's THE SHADOW.